你好 ！

I hope you are all enjoying the Mandarin classes you have had so far. We left from Edinburgh airport two weeks ago and said goodbye to our families before we for China for 10 months, which at the time seemed very scary but we are all settling in well to our lives here and it's definitely starting to feel more real now. This is a photo of the group from Scotland before we left.

Most of the Chinese people here know very little English and my Mandarin skills need a lot of practice so it has been very challenging to do simple tasks such as reading menus and ordering food. So far we have just been pointing to the characters and saying “zhe ge” 这个which means “this one”! Most of the time this works out okay and the Chinese food is very good or “hen hao” 很好. Here are some photos of some food we have tried. The first photo is some street food I bought and I couldn't honestly tell you what is in it but it tasted good!

Moving out is a big deal for everyone, since living in China we have all had to grow up very quickly, when I lived in Larbert I have to be honest, my mum did my washing, ironing and bought my food so doing this myself has been a big change, although we still haven't bought an iron! There is a Tesco here in Tianjin that is a short walk from where we stay so we can buy most of what we need, although all the packaging is in Chinese characters which most of us can't read yet. Things like that make us much more motivated to study hard for our classes. Our big shop in Tesco did take quite a while and by the time we had finished it was dark outside, it was a lot of fun though and we’re all making friends very quickly!

I have been attending classes at the university for a week now and I am really enjoying learning more about Chinese, the classes are difficult because my teachers do not speak any English during the lessons so sometimes it is hard to understand but this will help us more with learning Chinese in the long run! We have also all been given Chinese names, mine is 按莱An Lai) Do any of you know your Chinese names? You could try and ask your Chinese teacher to help you to find out if you don't and have a try at writing them?

I have also got a mascot for your class that I have with me in China! Would you as a class come up with a name for him/her?? You could think of a Scottish or Chinese name for the bear and let me know what you want the name to be.

I hope you have enjoyed my first blog! If you have any questions or suggestions about what you'd like me to write about please let me know, I would also love to hear about what you have been doing in class and I'm looking forward to hearing from you all soon.

Ana x